One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

MyAmericanFuture

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

August 19, 2014: Films for the Dog Days: Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala

[Nothing beats
the summer heat better than watching characters sweat it out from the coolness
of a movie theater. So in this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy five hot and
heavy dog days films. Add your responses and summertime movies for a
crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll sweat it out!]

On two swelting
interracial romances that work particularly well in combination.

I don’t have hard proof for this,
but I believe that when we Americans think and talk about interracial
relationships, we do so first and foremost, and perhaps much of the time
solely, through the lens of black and white. As is often the case, my starting
point for this idea is my own perspective, my own engagement with such
simplifying national narratives—despite my past interracial marriage to someone
whose identity falls outside of that binary, I believe that I do tend to link
the topic explicitly and consistently to issues of black and white (as
illustrated by an
earlier post on cultural representations of controversial issues, where I
mentioned Guess Who’sComing to Dinner and All in the Family/The Jeffersons in relation to interracial relationships). And
moving beyond my own individual perspective, I would cite two quick (and very
distinct) examples of this trend at work more broadly: the Supreme Court case
that overturned all remaining state laws outlawing interracial marriage, Loving
v. Virginia (1967), was
responding not only to a marriage between a white man and a black woman but
also to a statute that framed the issue in terms of those two races, and thus
the Court’s decision likewise focused (not entirely, but at times) on how such
laws treated “the white and Negro participants in an interracial marriage”; and
one of the best scholarly works on images of this topic in our literary
history, Werner Sollors’ Neither
Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature
(1997), likewise focuses (as its title indicates) on those two racial
identities and communities.

The respective prominence of two films
released within a year of one another, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever
(1991) and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala
(1992), provides another illustration of this trend, as well as an opportunity
to move beyond any one understanding of interracial marriage and toward a more
meaningful analysis of the issue in American culture and identity more broadly.
Both films were successful at the (domestic) box office, especially in
relationship to their respective budgets and releases: Lee’s film grossed $32.5
million, on a budget of roughly $14 million and a wide release; Nair’s grossed
$7.3 million, on a budget of under $1 million and a pretty limited release.
Both similarly received prestigious recognition from film festivals and awards
ceremonies dedicated to supporting independent films: Nair’s triumphed at the
Venice Film Festival and won an Independent Spirit Award (among others); Lee’s
won at Cannes and a New York Film Critics Circle Award (ditto). Yet it seems
clear to me that Lee’s film has lasted in our public consciousness in a way
that Nair’s has not. While there are any number of plausible factors for that
difference, many of which have little to do with race—Lee was only two years
removed from Do the Right Thing
(1989), the film that had put him on the map in a major way, while Nair had
directed only one other, relatively unknown feature film, Salaam Bombay!
(1988); Lee’s film featured a star-making, award-winning turn from Samuel L. Jackson as a
mercurial crack addict (although Nair’s film did star Denzel Washington in an
award-winning role, just two years after winning an Oscar for Glory, so this factor doesn’t quite hold
up)—I think it’s fair to say that Lee’s portrayal of a romance between an
African-American architect and an Italian-American secretary tapped into our
dominant narratives about interracial relationships much more fully than Nair’s
depiction of a Ugandan-Indian-American motel employee falling for an
African-American carpet cleaner.

One could get plenty of mileage
trying to figure out which factors have most contributed to the two films’
respective legacies (or, quite possibly, discovering that I’m wrong about those
legacies), but again and as usual my ideal would be a different and I believe
more broadly productive emphasis: what we can gain by watching both films, not
only individually but also as a pair of contemporaneous cultural
representations of interracial relationships in the closing decade of the 20th
century. And I think that both are particularly interesting, and particularly
if complicatedly interconnected, in their depictions of the protagonists’
families and social networks. I don’t mean just how those families and networks
respond to the interracial relationships themselves—certainly the
near-universal judgments and critiques from all three (or four, if New York
African American is considered distinct from Mississippi African American)
cultural communities are telling, but I think the films are at least as
interesting in how they construct the complex worlds of their respective
settings and the familial and social networks within them. That means in each
case both a kind of immigrant community (very literally and recently for the
Ugandan Indian family in Mississippi;
more as a vibrant and ongoing heritage for the Italian Americans in Jungle) and a homegrown African American
one, but also includes other social and cultural factors—such as drug culture
or the rise of an African American urban middle class in Jungle and the dictatorship and impact of Idi Amin or African
American life in the post-Civil Rights South in Mississippi—that add significant layers and complications to any
black and white vision of these different communities.

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: